Aquilano.Rimondi / Fall 2012 RTW

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Back in Tiepolo’s day, women in aristocratic circles might have spent about, oh, two hours or so to get dressed, once they (or more strictly speaking, those indentured in their service) had dealt with the stays, the paniers, and the stomachers, not to mention the parures of jewels. Pity that the likes of Tomasso Aquilano and Roberto Rimondi of Aquilano.Rimondi weren’t around then. The duo had been looking at Tiepolo’s early 18th-century godly orchestrations of paint, canvas, and divinity, as well as the works of Mantegna and Artemesia, for fall. The result was a baroque vision of short-boned dresses with sculpted hips, elaborately and expertly rendered in iridescent velvet, leather, and silk scrolled with jewels and heat-pressed curlicue motifs, in shades of ruby, emerald, and sapphire, that will take approximately 56 seconds to do up, assuming you have someone at hand to tackle the zipper that runs the length of the back. And unlike those in the royal court, barely able to move with the weight of everything they were wearing, Aquilano.Rimondi’s looks are, if not exactly light as air, then certainly close to it; they were also referencing scuba with those very same dresses.

“We are believers in maximalism,” Aquilano said backstage, in the moments leading up to the show, as he and Rimondi were trying to effect their own divine intervention by getting the models dressed while being interviewed in front of a slew of television cameras. “It’s important to make women sit up and take notice of what you can do. Give them a simple black coat and they’ll think, ‘I could have designed that myself.’ ” So, yes, they had coats, but theirs are in a micro-jacquard that they’d had specially woven for a lean, high-buttoning style cut with a frocklike flow at the back, worn over flared crop pants and velvet bow pumps and bootees.

Both the coats and dresses came with that curiously chic touch that has been all over Milan; a high-necked or curved collar that gives a cardinal-like flourish to the look. With their collection, Aquilano.Rimondi caught the ecclesiastical opulence that has been occurring here as much as the Duomo holds mass, which is to say, several times daily. It’s the kind of excessive richness that Alexander McQueen would have plundered back in the day, a particularly dark and dramatic idea of sacredness. From Aquilano.Rimondi, though, it springs from more earthly concerns. “When the economy here is so bad,” said Aquilano, with a sigh, “you have to make fashion special and joyous. We’re designers, yes, but we also have to interpret what’s going on around us, and do our best to make it a little better.”